Ben Carson was the first neurosurgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins, so, he’s kind of a super hero.

But apparently, he’s also not a bad accountant.

President Trump picked Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose budget grew by leaps and bounds under Barack Obama.

In one of his first acts as HUD Secretary, Carson ordered an audit of the agency. What he found was staggering: $520 billion in bookkeeping errors.

“The total amounts of errors corrected in HUD’s notes and consolidated financial statements were $516.4 billion and $3.4 billion, respectively,” the auditors wrote.

But there were plenty of other problems, too.

There were several other unresolved audit matters, which restricted our ability to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to express an opinion. These unresolved audit matters relate to (1) the Office of General Counsel’s refusal to sign the management representation letter, (2) HUD’s improper use of cumulative and first-in, first-out budgetary accounting methods of disbursing community planning and development program funds, (3) the $4.2 billion in nonpooled loan assets from Ginnie Mae’s stand-alone financial statements that we could not audit due to inadequate support, (4) the improper accounting for certain HUD assets and liabilities, and (5) material differences between HUD’s subledger and general ledger accounts. This audit report contains 11 material weaknesses, 7 significant deficiencies, and 5 instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations.

The same problems were detailed for each of the last three audits, and the auditors say the continued problems “were due to an inability to establish a compliant control environment, implement adequate financial accounting systems, retain key financial staff, and identify appropriate accounting principles and policies.”

So, look for Carson to get out his scalpel and start operating. Or perhaps he’ll use a machete.

Former CIA operations officer Scott Uehlinger, co-host of The Station Chief podcast, talked about the Susan Rice “unmasking” story with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily.

“I think it’s an issue which deeply concerns people like myself and other people, working-level officers in the intel community,” Uehlinger said. “Even though at this point, there seems to be no evidence of breaking the law, this ‘unmasking’ of people was ill-advised at best. I think it really shows that abuse of power and the fact that many people in the Obama administration were willing to violate the spirit of the laws designed to protect Americans, perhaps rather than the law itself.”

“As a working-level CIA officer, we were always told by upper authority, you’re always told to – and the quote is – ‘avoid the appearance of impropriety,’” he said. “Well, this does not pass that smell test, definitely.”

Uehlinger said another thing that concerns working-level officers in the intelligence and military communities is “the American people, average Americans like myself, are tired of seeing two sets of rules followed by the higher-ups and then the working-level people.”

“This is just part of that again. A working-level officer would have gotten into big trouble doing anything remotely like this,” he observed. “But now, we have a lot of people saying that she should just be given a pass.”

“While I understand, you know, it’s important that the Trump administration has to move forward with its domestic agenda, but these allegations demand to be further investigated,” he urged.

Kassam proposed that Democrats and their media would not allow the Trump administration to move forward with any part of its agenda until this “Russia hysteria” is cleaned up. That will be a difficult task since, as Kassam noted, the hysteria has been burning at fever pitch for months without a shred of evidence to back up the wildest allegations.

Uehlinger agreed and addressed Kassam’s point that media coverage alternates between “no surveillance was conducted” and “we know everything about Trump’s Russia connections.”

“The Obama administration relaxed the rule that allowed raw intelligence that was gathered by the NSA to be shared throughout the government,” he pointed out. “First of all, to relax that, there is absolutely no operational justification for doing that. With all of the counter-intelligence problems, with espionage, with Snowden, all these things we’ve had, to raise by an order of magnitude the access to this very sensitive information makes no operational sense at all.”

“So for someone to approve that, it’s clear they had another intent, and I believe the intent was to allow for further leakage,” he charged. “To give more people access, thus more leaks, which, in fact, would hurt the Trump administration. It seems very obvious when you put that together and combine it with the actions of Susan Rice and other people in unmasking people. That is the true purpose behind this.”

“I say this as somebody who – you have to remember, when I was a station chief overseas, this is what I was reporting on. I was in countries like Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kosovo – countries which constantly had the offices of the prime minister or president using the intelligence services to suppress the domestic opposition. So I’ve been to this rodeo before, many a time. I saw the storm clouds gathering several weeks ago, and everything I’ve suspected has so far come to fruition,” Uehlinger said.

He pronounced it “very disappointing” that such transparent abuse of government power for partisan politics would occur in the United States.

“An intelligence service has to have the trust of the people and the government in order to function effectively,” he said. “With all of these scandals happening, and with the name of perhaps the CIA and other intelligence community elements in the mud, this makes the object of protecting our national security more problematic. The agencies have to have the trust of the American people, and they’re losing it, because it seems as though they’ve been weaponized – perhaps, like I said, not breaking the law but playing very close to the line.”

Kassam suggested that leaking the information might have been illegal, even if Rice was legally entitled to request information on Donald Trump’s campaign and unmask the U.S. persons monitored during surveillance of foreign intelligence targets.

“That’s absolutely the case,” Uehlinger agreed. He went on to argue that the absence of hard evidence for any wrongdoing by the Trump campaign in all of these leaks was highly significant.

“Since basically the Obama administration has sort of loaded this with these rule changes and all to allow for leaks the fact that there is no ‘smoking gun’ of Trump administration collusion with Russia indicates that there isn’t any. There is nothing substantial here because a juicy morsel like that would certainly have been leaked by the same people that have been leaking everything else. The fact it hasn’t been leaked out means it does not exist,” he reasoned.

Kassam said some of the Russia hysteria came from imputing sinister motives to conventional business dealings, arguing that Trump’s organization made deals around the world, and it is exceedingly difficult to do business with any Russian entity that is not somehow connected to the Russian government.

“That’s an excellent point. You’re absolutely right,” Uehlinger responded. “It shows these people who are doing these gambits are relying on the relative ignorance of the American public of the actual nuts and bolts of intelligence to make their point. Anyone with any background in this stuff can see it for what it is: a desperate attempt to discredit an administration because they were crushed in the past elections.”

Report: Susan Rice Ordered ‘Spreadsheets’ of Trump Campaign Calls

President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, allegedly ordered surveillance of Donald Trump’s campaign aides during the last election, and maintained spreadsheets of their telephone calls, the Daily Caller reports.

The alleged spreadsheets add a new dimension to reports on Sunday and Monday by blogger Mike Cernovich and Eli Lake of Bloomberg News that Rice had asked for Trump aides’ names to be “unmasked” in intelligence reports. The alleged “unmasking” may have been legal, but may also have been part of an alleged political intelligence operation to disseminate reports on the Trump campaign widely throughout government with the aim of leaking them to the press.

At the time that radio host Mark Levin and Breitbart News compiled the evidence of surveillance, dissemination, and leaking — all based on mainstream media reports — the mainstream media dismissed the story as a “conspiracy theory.”

Now, however, Democrats are backing away from that allegation, and from broader allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, as additional details of the Obama administration’s alleged surveillance continue to emerge.

The Daily Caller reports:

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

The surveillance and spreadsheet operation were allegedly “ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.” According to a Fox News report on Monday, former White House aide Ben Rhodes was also involved.

Rhodes and Rice were both implicated in a disinformation campaign to describe the Benghazi terror attack in Sep. 2012 as a protest against a YouTube video. Rhodes also boasted of creating an “echo chamber” in the media to promote the Iran deal, feeding stories to contrived networks of “experts” who offered the public a steady stream of pro-agreement propaganda.

On Monday, Rhodes retweeted a CNN story quoting Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) claiming that the alleged unmasking was “nothing unusual.”

To the extent they have reported the surveillance story at all, CNN and other news outlets have focused on Trump’s tweets last month that alleged President Obama had “wiretapped” Trump Tower, describing the claims as unfounded.

CNN continued treating story dismissively on Monday, with The Lead host Jake Tapper insisting allegations of Russian interference in the election were more important than what he referred to as the president’s effort to distract from them.

Later in the day, host Don Lemon declared he would ignore the surveillance story and urged viewers to do likewise.

The potential abuse of surveillance powers for political purposes has long troubled civil libertarians, and could affect the re-authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act later this year.

Here’s one of the leaders of the official propaganda department for the Obama Administration

Since news broke Monday that the Obama Administration’s National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, directed the “unmasking” of NSA intercepts of Trump associates, CNN has raced to shoot down the blockbuster report.

CNN Tonight’s Don Lemon went so far as to announce he would ignore the news at all costs.

While interviewing a Democratic congressman, CNN’s Chris Cuomo claimed it was “demonstrably untrue” Rice sought surveillance of the Trump team, even as that’s exactly what yesterday’s reports prove.

Over the last 24 hours, the network has also repeatedly called on its chief national security correspondent — who was also a political appointee in the Obama White House — Jim Sciutto, to dismiss the reports as a non-story; Sciutto has even excused Rice claiming ignorance of the unmasking scandal two weeks ago, arguing Rice “wasn’t aware” what unmasking Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was referring to.

And on Tuesday’s “New Day,” anchor Alisyn Camerota openly pleaded with Sen. John McCain to write-off the news as unimportant.

Last night, Lemon began “CNN Tonight” with an announcement that the Rice report a “fake scandal ginned up by right-wing media and Trump” that he would not be baited into justifying with coverage.

“On this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending,” it’s legitimate, he said. “Nor will we aid and abet the people trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating a diversion. Not going to do it.”

Sciutto also claimed the story was “ginned up” to distract from Trump tweeting that the Trump Tower was “wiretapped,” when it was in fact communications were picked up through ordinary NSA surveillance.

“Again, to note by senior intelligence officials who work for both Democrats and Republicans, this appears to be a story, largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this larger investigation,” Sciutto told Anderson Cooper, explaining that “someone close to Ambassador Rice” told him this type of unmasking is “not unusual.”

In another appearance, Sciutto even attempted to excuse Rice from claiming to have no knowledge of the unmasking she’s been caught orchestrating.

“From her perspective she didn’t know what specific unmasking Devin Nunes and others are talking about, in part because that is something she asks — or asked during the regular course of her work as national security adviser,” he said. “I do know from speaking to people yesterday close to her that she doesn’t know specifically what Devin Nunes and others are accusing her of when it comes to unmasking because that was something sets in the regular course of her job.”

And in yet another appearance, Sciutto also setup something of a strawman, arguing that the unmasking story is not important because “unmasking is not leaking.”

During an interview with Sen. John McCain, CNN’s Camerota plainly tried nudging the Arizona senator into dismissing the Rice bombshell:

CAMEROTA: “Okay, senator, I want to move on to other news of the day and that is, as you know, the Trump White House has talked about what they see or they say they see as a controversy of the former national security adviser Susan Rice unmasking a name, someone on team Trump, that was somehow caught up in some incidental collection of surveillance. They say that this is a controversy, it shows that she has done something wildly out of the bounds of normalcy. Is this business as usual for a national security adviser to ask for a name to be revealed, an American name, if she wants to know more or is this some sort of a controversy?”
McCAIN: “I think the circumstances indicate that there’s a possibility that that request could have been politically motivated. But we need to get to the bottom of it. As I’ve said, and I’ll probably say many more times because I’m kind of boring, this is a centipede. A shoe will drop every few days, the latest the meeting in Seychelles. This is a requirement, in my view, why we need a select committee in order to get through all this because there’s lots more shoes that will drop. I can’t make a judgment on what I just heard. She did have the authority to do it. What was the motivation for doing it, I think is the question.”
CAMEROTA: “What we’ve heard from the reporting, is that if she saw a masked name that said American number one had these conversations with Russians at the same time that President Obama had imposed sanctions, wouldn’t that arouse some curiosity on her part?”
McCAIN: “All I can say, Alisyn, is that I don’t know enough to reach a conclusion except to say this is another aspect of this multi-dimensional scandal.”

UPDATE: In an interview on MSNBC addressing this story, Susan Rice has now confirmed she unmasked Trump campaign officials, but is denying doing so for political reasons.

Susan Rice Requested Unmasking of People Connected to Trump Transition

Susan Rice, who was former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, did not respond to a report from Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake that on multiple occasions, she made requests to unmask United States citizens connected to President Donald Trump’s transition team.

According to Lake, Rice did not respond to an email seeking comment on the story.

The breaking news helps confirm some of President Trump’s accusations that senior Obama officials were involved in disseminating classified information about his transition team to the media, fueling new details about the congressional investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

On Monday, Fox News senior correspondent Adam Housley said that the “unprecedented” unmasking took place at the direction of “very high-up” officials.

“A lot of these men and women in the intelligence communities did not want to speak about what’s going on because they were concerned about those methods being known,” Housley reported. “But now, they figure they might as well at least clarify things since Nunes has been leaked to by someone they don’t know or at least they tell me they don’t know.”

Susan Rice has not denied the allegations, saying only, “I know nothing about this” when asked about the reports last month on PBS.

Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel

White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.

The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.

Rice did not respond to an email seeking comment on Monday morning. Her role in requesting the identities of Trump transition officials adds an important element to the dueling investigations surrounding the Trump White House since the president’s inauguration.

Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are probing any ties between Trump associates and a Russian influence operation against Hillary Clinton during the election. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Representative Devin Nunes, is also investigating how the Obama White House kept tabs on the Trump transition after the election through unmasking the names of Trump associates incidentally collected in government eavesdropping of foreign officials.

Rice herself has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking. Last month when she was asked on the “PBS NewsHour” about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: “I know nothing about this,” adding, “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today.”

Rice’s requests to unmask the names of Trump transition officials does not vindicate Trump’s own tweets from March 4 in which he accused Obama of illegally tapping Trump Tower. There remains no evidence to support that claim.

But Rice’s multiple requests to learn the identities of Trump officials discussed in intelligence reports during the transition period does highlight a longstanding concern for civil liberties advocates about U.S. surveillance programs. The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice’s unmasking requests were likely within the law.

The news about Rice also sheds light on the strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks. It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month, the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice’s requests to unmask U.S. persons.

The ranking Democrat on the committee Nunes chairs, Representative Adam Schiff, viewed these reports on Friday. In comments to the press over the weekend he declined to discuss the contents of these reports, but also said it was highly unusual for the reports to be shown only to Nunes and not himself and other members of the committee.

Indeed, much about this is highly unusual: if not how the surveillance was collected, then certainly how and why it was disseminated.